Cryptozoic! by Brian Aldiss Read Free Book Online Page A

Passion,' 'Guernica,'

'Sinning in the City.'"

"The difference is one of degree, presumably."

"It's the degrees I'm up against right now."

They exchanged smiles. He pressed into the back to find Borrow. For the

first time -- or had he felt the same thing before and forgotten it? --

he thought that Ver was more interesting than her husband.

Borrow was pottering about outside in the grey daylight. Like his wife,

he was inclining to stoutness, but he still dressed as immaculately as

ever, with the old hint of the dandy about him. He straightened as Bush

came across to him and held out a hand.

"Haven't seen you in a million years, Eddie. How's life? Do you still

hold the record for low-distance mind-travel?"

"As far as I know, Roger. How're you doing?"

"What's the nearest year to home you ever reached?"

"There were men about." He did not get the drift of, or see the necessity

for, his friend's question.

"That's pretty good. Could you date it?"

"It was some time in the Bronze Age." Of course, everyone who minded was

fascinated by the idea that, when the discipline was developed further,

it might be possible for them to visit historic times. Who knows, the day

might even dawn when it would be possible to break through the entropy

barrier entirely and mind into the future.

Borrow slapped him on the back. "Good going! See any artists at work?

We had a chap in the bar the other day claimed he had minded up to the

Stone Age. I thought that was pretty good, but evidently you still hold

the record."

"Yeah, well they say it needs a disrupted personality to get as far as

I got!"

They looked into each other's eyes. Borrow dropped his gaze almost at

once. Perhaps he recalled that Bush hated being touched. The latter,

regretting his outburst, made an effort to pull himself together and

be pleasant.

"Nice to see you and Ver again. Looks as if The Amniote Egg is doing well.

And -- Roger, you're painting again!" He had noticed what Borrow was

stacking. He stooped, and gently lifted one of the plasbord panels into

the light.

There were nine panels. Bush looked through them all in growing amazement.

"You've taken up your old hobby again," he said thickly.

"Poaching a bit on your territory, I'm afraid, Eddie." But these were

not SKGs. These panels seemed to look back, in one sense, to Gabo and

Pevsner, but using the new materials, here etiolated, here compounded;

the effect was startlingly new, not sculpture, not groupage, not machine.

All nine panels were variations on a theme, encrusted, as Bush saw, with

perspex and glass, and with rotating fragments of metal held in place by

electro-magnets. They were so formed that they carried suggestions of

great distances, with relationships that varied according to the point

from which they were viewed. Some were in continual movement, powered by

pill-thrust from microminiaturized nuclear drives set in the panel bases,

so that the static element had been eliminated.

It was immediately clear to Bush what the groupages represented:

abstractions of the time strata folded so ominously about The Amniote Egg.

They had been created with absolute clarity and command -- command of

vision and material, coalescing to produce masterworks. Hard after Bush's

awe came his jealousy, burning through him like a flood.

"Very cute," he said, expressionlessly.

"I thought you might understand them," Borrow said, staring hard into his

friend's face.

"I came here after a girl I know. I want a drink!"

"Have one on the house. Your girl may be in the bar."

He led the way and Bush followed, too angry to speak. The panels were

astonishing -- cool, yet with a Dionysiac quality -- revolutionary,

selective, individual . . . they gave Bush that prickle between his

shoulder blades which he recognized as his private signal when something

had genius; or if not genius, a quality he might imitate and perhaps

transmute into genius, whatever the hell genius was -- a stronger